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Current Issue (Sustainability) + Pleasure, vol. 1: Culture + Architecture Number 30, Spring/Summer 2009

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Spheres Theory
Talking to Myself About the Poetics of Space

Peter Sloterdijk
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
February 17, 2009, a lecture with Sloterdijk asking himself questions.

Mr. Sloterdijk, as part of your trilogy on spheres,1 you set out to create a theory that construes space as a key
anthropological category. Why this emphasis?
We have to speak of space because humans are them-selves an effect of the space they create. Human evolution can only be
understood if we also bear in mind the mystery of insulation/island-making [Insulierungs-geheimsis] that so defines the
emergence of humans: Humans are pets that have domesticated themselves in the incubators of early cultures. All the
generations before us were aware that you never camp outside in nature. The camps of man’s ancestors, dating back over a
million years, already indicated that they were distancing themselves from their surroundings.

In the third volume of your trilogy there is an extensive chapter on architecture, “Indoors: Architectures of
Foam.” Why did you choose such a provocative metaphor?
First of all for a philosophical reason: We are simply not capable of continuing the old cosmology of ancient Europe that rested
on equating the house and home with the world. Classical metaphysics is a phantasm on an implicit motif that was highlighted
in only a few places— by Hegel and Heidegger for example—namely that the world must itself be construed as having the
character of a house and that people in Western culture should be grasped not only as mortals but also as house residents.
Their relation to the world as a whole is that of inhabit-ants in a crowded building called cosmos. So the quest-ions are: Why
should modern thought bid goodbye to this equation of world and house? Why do we need a new image in order to designate
how modern man lives in social and architectural containers? Why do I propose the concept of foams?

The simple answer is: because since the Enlightenment we have no longer needed a universal house in order to find the world
a place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices is a unité d’habitation, a stackable number of inhabitable cells. Through the motif
of the inhabited cell I can uphold the spherical imperative that applies to all forms of human life but does not presuppose
cosmic totalization. The stacking of cells in an apartment block, for instance, no longer generates the classical world/house
entity but an architectural foam, a multi-chambered system made up of relatively stabilized personal worlds.

Is this deterioration of the world-house or the all- embracing sphere into foam bubbles an image of entropy?
On the contrary, in modernity far more complexity is established than was possible under the classical notion of unity. We
must not forget that metaphysics is the realm of strong simplifications, and thus has a consolatory effect. The structure of
foam is incompatible with a monospherical mindset; the whole can no longer be portrayed as a large, round whole. Let me
use an anecdote to indicate the immense change: In his memoirs, Albert Speer recollects that the designs for the
gigantomanic new Reich Chancellery in Berlin originally envisaged a swastika crowning the dome, which was to be over 290
meters high. One summer’s day in 1939 Hitler then said: “The crown of the largest building in the world must be the eagle on
the globe.” This remark should be taken as attesting to the brutalist restoration of imperial monocentric thinking—as if Hitler
had for a moment intervened in the agony of classical meta-physics. By contrast, around 1920, in his reflections on the
fundamentals of theoretical biology [Theoretische Biologie], Jakob von Uexküll had already affirmed: “It was an error to
believe that the human world constituted a shared stage for all living creatures. Each living creature has its own special stage
that is just as real as the special stage the humans have…. This insight offers us a completely new view of the universe as
something that does not consist of a single soap bubble which we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our horizons
and assume infinite proportions, and is instead made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and
intersect everywhere.” Le Corbusier himself used the image of the soap bubble in order to explain the essence of a good
building: “The soap bubble is completely harmonious, if the breath in it is spread equally, and well regulated on the inside.
The outside is the product of an inside.”2 This statement could be taken as the axiom of spherology: Vital space can only be
explained in terms of the priority of the inside.

In your exploration of the “architectures of foam,” you write that modernity renders the issue of residence
explicit. What do you mean by that?
Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological
assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate
this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century
express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most
archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern
man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this
reason, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-
interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park
interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and
brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This
is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and
at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in
20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design—these are the three paradigms of
modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors.

Le Corbusier once said that we had to choose between revolution and architecture. He decided in favor of
architecture. In your interpretation does that mean that he voted for the explication of residential conditions?
Revolution is simply the wrong word chosen to describe explication. An engineer always opts for the better technology.
Everything successful is operational, while revolutionary phases achieve nothing as long as they do not contain real potential
abilities. Which is why no one today asks what programs are being announced but rather what programs are being written.
Writing is an archetype of ability: The invention of script marks the beginning of the operational subversion of the world as it
exists. Only that is effective which popularizes getting a new handle on things. Incidentally, modern apartments are full of
technical appliances that explicate life in the household. Current tools no longer have handles, because handles belong to an
outdated stage, having given way to devises with buttons: We have arrived in the world of fingertip operations.

To return to Benjamin: To what extent should we read his reference to the major interiors as an explication of
capitalism?
Just as Freud tried to make dreams explicit, Benjamin proposed a kind of dream interpretation of capitalism. My explicative
work refers to the spatial dynamism of our being-in-the-world. I want to show how every shape of created space entails a
problem of projection. Humans are animals who like to move, who change rooms, space, indeed even the element in which
they live. They always live while on the “move from A to B and back again,” to quote Andy Warhol, and they are the way they
are because they always take with them into each new space the memory of a different space they previously were in. In
other words, you cannot create an absolutely neutral space, and you cannot invent a completely new space; you always
generate differential spaces that are out-fitted in distinction from a different, former space. Homo sapiens possesses a
projective dynamism that stems from the fact that our species is equipped with memories of prenatal situations.

I am right in thinking this prenatalism is the leitmotif in the first section of your Spheres project, which you have
titled “Bubbles”?
Spheres I is essentially dedicated to elaborating a strong concept of intimacy. To this end I develop an explicitly regressive
movement in order to approach the topic of being-in, in reverse gear (as it were). I first address the phenomenon of inter-
faciality. Let me explain: If people look at each other, a nontrivial space arises that cannot be construed as physical or
geometric—inter-facial space. Here it does not help if I take a tape measure to determine the distance between the tip of my
nose and your nose. The inter-facial relationship creates a quite unique spatial relationship. I describe the latter in terms of
mother/child inter-faciality, something we can study in the animal kingdom, too. In my next step I try to inter-pret the images
of the inter-cordial relationships that arise when people are attuned to each other affectively so that two hearts form a
resonant space together—here, the metaphorical factor increases. And then I tiptoe up to the most intimate of relationships,
that between a mother and a child: In the process, I explicate how women are architectural units—at least if seen from the
perspective of the nascent life.

Women’s bodies are apartments! Now behind this rather shocking thesis we find a fairly dramatic perspective on natural
history. Among insects, reptiles, fish, and birds—that is, among the vast majority of species—the fertilized egg, the carrier of
genetic information, gets laid in an outside setting that must vaguely possess the properties of an external uterus or nest.
Now something quite incredible happens in the evolutionary line that leads to mammals: The body of the female members of
the species is defined as an ecological niche for her progeny. This leads to a dramatic turn inwards in evolution. What we see
is a dual use of the female members of a species, as it were: Henceforth they are no longer only egg-laying systems (in a
metabiological sense, femininity means the successful phase of an ovulation system), but they lay the eggs within
them-selves and make their own body available as an eco-logical niche for their progeny. In this way, they become integrated
mother animals. The result is a type of event that had not existed in the world before: birth. It is the proto-drama that shapes
the departure from the primary total setting to arrival as an individual. Thus, birth is a biologically late type of event and has
ontological consequences. The expression “to be born” emphasizes the animal side; the expression “to see the light of day”
stresses the existential difference. A very explicit logic is required to explain this.

Are you saying that the projection of this primary basic experience is operative in all later architectural
activities?
Exactly. Here the creative side to projection emerges. Projection evidently does not refer, as in psycho-analysis, just to
feelings (that is, confused affects) but to the process of spatial creation per se. If we thus ask: What interiors will living
beings wish to have if they bear within them the marks of being born? Then the answer must be: They will no doubt opt for
interiors that enable them to project a trace of that archaic state of protection onto their later shell constructions. The
construction of shells for life creates a series of uterus repetitions in outdoor milieus. Architects must understand that they
stand in the middle between biology and philosophy. Biology deals with the environment, philosophy with the world.

But that does not explain the great diversity of human spatial needs. Not all individuals pass on the wish for an
“archaic state of protection” in this shape. When in small spaces, many people feel locked in and develop
claustrophobic responses. We could divide people into the cave dwellers and the tree dwellers—for the one, it is
the love of the shell that counts; for the other, the love of spaciousness.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. The spheres theory does not seek to explain everything. It is not a universal theory but
an explicit form of spatial interpretation. Incidentally, you can account for all manner of different types of space from the
vantage point of prenatality—wide oceanic spaces on the one side and hellishly confined spaces on the other. addresses
micro-spherological phenomena in general. I understand microspherology as the general theory of the interior. These
phenomena are always interpersonal in structure, and the dyadic relationship offers me the paradigm here. I show how we
should construe the human dyad and follow it back as far as prenatal proto-intersubjectivity. The discovery here is that
initially it is not so much a mother/child but a child/placenta relationship. The original doubling takes place at a prepersonal
level by the bond formed by the so-called psycho-acoustic umbilical cord. Here, I draw on the thought of Alfred Tomatis and
other authors who have plowed this tricky field.3 They regard the fetal ear as the organ of primary bonding. That is quite
irritatingly exciting for those who accept the postulates and nonsense for those who do not believe there is an issue here.

What role does the act of explication play here?

Explication is a matter not just of the conceptual instruments that we deploy to illuminate the phenomena of life—such as
dwelling, working, and loving—it is not just a cognitive process. Rather, it has to do with real elaboration. That can only be
achieved using an expressive logic or a logic of production. Needless to say, here I’m following in the tradition of Marxist and/
or pragmatist anthropology. If it is true that all of natural history is necessary in order to explain the formation of the human
hand (or rather the difference between a paw and a hand), then it is likewise true that we need all of cultural history to
explain the difference between noises and languages.

Not everything that implicitly exists needs to be rendered explicit. An explication covers only those parts of the context of life
that can be technically reconstructed. The assumption underlying my undertaking is a metabiological proposition: What we
call technology rests on the attempt to replace implicit biological and social immune systems with explicit social immune
systems. You need to understand what you want to replace better than a mere user understands it. If you wish to build a
prosthetic, you have to be able to define the function of the organ to be replaced more precisely than if you use the original.
Here, you move from the actual functional statement to the level of the general and then back to the possible functional
equivalent. And you can recognize functionalists by the fact they always ask two questions: at first, What does the system
achieve in its current form? and at the end, What could be done instead?

Architects are pretty good at this. When they build a private residence they ask: What features should this
intimate space have? What should it be able to do? It is above all a protective space, one that provides relief.
How can we represent it with technical means? Architects would probably think, “We need to build cuddly
spots!”
And that would probably not be far off the mark. If you ask what a cuddly spot represents, then in terms of functional
analysis you arrive at the concept of the “primacy of the secluding atmosphere.” And if you have recognized the primacy of
such a secluding atmosphere, indeed the primacy of the atmospheric per se, then architects can definitely infer from this that
they cannot take geometric ideologies as their starting point. Instead, they need to think in terms of the atmospheric effect of
space.

That calls for a strong act of translation. Intimacy is an intersubjective category that can be expressed spatially
in many different ways.
As I said, I construe intersubjectivity as a nonphysical spatial relationship. Creatures of the human type can, through being
together, generate the effect of reciprocal accommodation. As the example of a pair of lovers clearly shows, lovers are in one
or another way already together; they are, when they are together, to a certain extent in each other. Meaning that the classic
question “My place or yours?” is actually superfluous. Moreover, it offers a nice example of explication: This going-
some-where-together-as-already-being-together is the kinetic explication of what the being-together of lovers implies.
Because the two are implicitly already together, they have a list of options of explicit localizations.

You take the architectural example of the apartment to show what the process of explication can achieve as
regards modern residential living.
I interpret apartment construction as the creation of a world-island for a single person. To understand this, you need to
concede that the word world not only means the big whole that God and other jovial observers have before them. From the
outset, worlds take the stage in the plural and have an insular structure. Islands are miniatures of worlds that can be
inhabited as world models. For this reason, one must know what constitutes a minimally complete island, one capable of
being a world. In my study on “insulations” [Insulierungen] I distinguish between three different types of islands: the
absolute island, such as a space station, which is placed as a completely implanted lifeworld into a milieu inimical to life; then
there are the relative islands like greenhouses for plants (one need think only of the well-known experiment Biosphere II);
and finally the anthropogenic islands, spaces built in such a way that humans can emerge. They form a self-insulating,
dynamic system reminiscent of a human incubator. You insert apes and out come humans. And how is that possible? How can,
to argue in a Darwinian and philosophical vein, apes enter into conditions of selfness [Selbstverhällnisse]? How did the
anthropogenic engine get kick-started?

I describe the human-generating island as a nine-dimensional space in which each of the dimensions must exist for the
human-generating effect to be triggered. If only one dimension is absent, you do not get a complete human. It all starts with
the chirotope, the place of the hand. And what does the hand have to do with the genesis of the human? The answer to this
question provides a first version of a theory of action, an elementary pragmatics. I then tackle the phonotope, the space of
sound in which groups that hear them-selves tarry. This is then followed by the uterotope, the space occupied by deeper-
seated memberships of shared caves; the thermotope, the sphere of warmth or the space where you get spoiled; and the
erototope, the place of jealousy and the field of desire. (I would like to note that the emergence of species-specific jealousy
was extremely important for the genesis of human beings, for humans are mimetic animals that have always watched what
other humans do attentively and jealously, in fact, even aping those who successfully behave as if they were not watching
what the others were doing). The next dimensions are the ergotope, the field of war and effort; the thanatotope, the space of
coexistence with the dead in which religious symbols prevail; and finally the nomotope, the space of the legal tensions that
provide a group with a normative backbone. Buckminster Fuller’s theorem of tensegrities gives an important role to this.

From this general theory of islands we can derive modern apartment culture, for an apartment will only function if it is
convincing as a minimally complete world-island for an individual.

It does not seem that, so far, this description contains the definition of residence, of the human being as a
residential being.
You must understand that houses are initially machines to kill time. In fact, in a primitive farmhouse people wait for a silent
event out in the fields, one they cannot influence but which, thank God, happens regularly—namely the moment when the
planted seeds bear fruit. In other words, people initially only live in a house because they confess to the conviction that it is
rewarding to await an event outside the house. In the agrarian world, the temporal structure of residing in houses must be
understood in terms of the compulsion to wait. This kind of being-in-the-house was first challenged in the course of the Middle
Ages, when in northwest Europe a wider- ranging urban culture had arisen again. Since then, a growing proportion of
European populations have been seized by a culture of impatience or not-being-able-to-wait. During Goethe’s day, in Germany
only 20% of the population was urbanized; 80% still lived under the old agrarian conditions. Heidegger, whom I would like, in
this context, to regard as the last thinker of rural life, continues to construe existential time as waiting time and thus also as
boredom. The event that this waiting leads to is of course something abysmally simple, namely the fact that things on the
tilled field become mature. The philosopher equates this tilled field with world history without bearing in mind that the worlds
of the cities can no longer assume the form of tilled fields. In the city, things do not mature, they are produced.

I move on from this definition of residential living as being-in-the-world put on hold and of the house as a place of waiting to
the house as a place of reception, the location where the important wheat gets sorted from the unimportant chaff. The
original house is a habitation plant. By spending much time there you unconsciously become a habitual unit with your
surroundings; you in-habit by habit. Once that has been achieved, the background has been created against which the
unusual can first stand out. Residential living is in this regard a dialectical practice—it makes itself useful for its opposite.

In a third step, I develop the theory of embedding or immersion. Here the philosophical theory of being-in, as originated by
Heidegger, is moved forward. I answer the question of what it means to be in something. How does that happen? I illustrate
these questions by relying on statements by Paul Valéry, who interpreted the being-in in terms of the paradigm of
architecture: For him, architecture means that men lock men into man-made works. Here we touch on the totalitarian side of
the art of building.

Finally, as the fourth stage of explication, I expose the essential nerve center of the phenomenon of residence, namely the
house’s destiny as a spatialized immune system. Here, I focus specifically on the dimension of designed atmosphere, the air
we breathe in a building. Part of the adventure of Modern architecture is that it has also rendered the apparently immaterial
sides of being—namely human residence in an atmospheric setting—explicit in technical and aesthetic terms. The modern art
of dwelling will not be able to get back to an earlier level of designing human containers.

Once I have taken these steps, it becomes clear that what I mean when I claim that the apartment (along with the sports
stadium) is the primary architectural icon of the 20th century. A monadology is needed to think the interior today. One
man—one apartment. One monad—one world cell….

… and at the beginning of architectural Modern- ism the adage was: one unmarried person— one apartment.
Right. Modern apartment construction rests on a celibate-based ontology. Just as modern biology defines life as the successful
phase of an immune system, so we could, in architectural theory, define existence as the successful phase of the one-person
household. Every-thing is drawn into the inner sphere of the apartment. World and household blend. If a one-person
existence can succeed at all, it is only because there is architectural support that turns the apartment itself into an entire
world prosthetic. Early Modern architects were thus right to see themselves as molders of humanity. If one ignores the shot of
megalomania, what remains is the fact that the architects of the one-person apartments have enabled the mass version of a
historically singular type of human being—at best it was otherwise pre-figured by the Christian hermit monks.

You describe the apartment as a studio of self-relationships. If we bear in mind that the history of humanity
started when hordes formed, with a rudimentary division of labor in hunting and in raising children, then the
emergence of this singular reproducing type of human, who can live almost autonomously, is slightly worrying. I
have two questions here: You just described intimacy, dyadic intimacy, as something that constitutes space.
What of that survives in the apartment culture? And are there no forms of coexistence that impact on space
between the extreme poles of single and mass, the solitary and the assembly?
The first question is easier to answer: The apartment individualists have discovered a process enabling them to form pairs
with themselves—incidentally, Andy Warhol, who, I have already mentioned, was one of the first to explicitly show this by
claiming that he married his tape recorder. Modern autogamy involves choosing a stance of “experiencing” one’s own life,
viewing it judgmentally from the outside. Individuals in the age of a culture of experience constantly seek difference from
themselves. They can choose as their partner none other than themselves as the inner Other. Strong individualism always
presumes that you draw inwards the second pole and the other poles that are part of a complete personality structure. The
basis for this psycho-structural move has long since been given in European culture, and elements of it can be traced back to
classical antiquity. The archetypal example is the hermit monks who moved to the Theban desert, a few days’ journey south
of Alexandria, in order to pray. As far as we know, they led inner lives that featured many relationships; the most famous
among them was St. Anthony, who was visited by tormenting spirits so often that there can be no talk of him having lived
alone. To put it in modern words, he shared a pad with his hallucinations.
Today, he would probably reside in a psychiatric ward, dosed to the gills with tranquilizers. How does this
extreme form of individuation differ from autism?
The autistic person does not possess the inner spaciousness that would enable him to be his own company. The individual’s
self-supplementation structure has deep media-anthropological roots and can only be explained in terms of media history. The
minimal formal condition of self-supplementation consists of the fact that a so-called individual is integrated into a dyad—with
a real or imaginary Other. The question of social life of the isolated individual is harder: What happens to the small-group
animal Homo sapiens if he sits in pure individualist form as the solitary inhabitant of his world apartment? Two possible
answers would seem obvious: One is that the individual on his own plays at being the entire horde. This implies the task of
representing twelve or twenty people within his inner world, members of at least three generations. Thus, in the absence of
real Others, a complete social structure has to be simulated.

Psychology regards the formation of a multiple personality as a symptom of illness, a serious disturbance in
personality development.
From my point of view, the multiple personality is nothing other than the individual’s answer to the dis-appearance of his real
social surroundings, and is thus a plausible response to the chronic lack of social stimulation. The second possibility relates to
the modern practice of networking. The horde returns in the guise of an iPhone address book. Close physical togetherness is
no longer a necessary condition of sociality. The future belongs to tele-socialism. The past returns as tele- horde life.

You use the heading “Dialectic of Modernization” to describe how society’s empty center is filled with illusionary
images of a center.
In Spheres III, I attempt to explain why we should not only purge the two portentous words revolution and mass from our
vocabulary, but also the concept of “society,” which suggests a coherence that could only be achieved by violent-asserting
conformism. The conglomerate of humans that has, since the 18th century, called itself “society” is precisely not based on the
atomic dots that we tend to call individuals. Instead, it is a patchwork of milieus that are structured as subcultures. Just think
of the world of horse lovers—a huge subculture in which you could lose yourself for the duration of your life but which is as
good as invisible if you are not a member of it. There are hundreds if not thousands of milieus in the current social terrain
that all have the tendency from their own viewpoint to form the center of the world and yet are as good as nonexistent for the
others. I term them “inter-ignorant systems.” And, among other things, they exist by virtue of a blindness rule. They may not
know of one another, since otherwise their members would be robbed of the enjoyment of being specialized members of a
select few. In terms of their profession, there are only two or three types of humans who can afford poly-valence in dealing
with milieus. The first are the architects, who (at least virtually) build containers for all; the second are the novelists, who
insert persons from all walks of life into their novels; finally come the priests, who speak at the burials of all possible classes
of the dead. But that is probably the entire list. Oops, I forgot the new sociologists à la Latour.

In other words, the multiple personality on the one hand and the single networker on the other—those are the two options I
see open to individualized populations. The way Homo sapiens is influenced by the dowry from the days of hording is no
doubt insurmount-able, but because the explication of that old heritage continues simultaneously in various directions, the
proto-social elements of the life of Homo sapiens can be reworked. They lead to an electronic tribalism. In the dyadic motifs,
by contrast, the intimate relationships are explicated to such a degree that intimacy can quite literally be played through with
the technical media of self-supplementation. In the long run, human types arise that are fairly unlike what we have known to
date.

The heyday of the models you describe for the apartment, from early Modernism through to Kisho Kurokawa and
for urbanism through to Constant, was in the 1960s. Then architecture changed direct-ion, with the city back in
focus—namely, the city as something intangible, indefinable, irreducible. The concept of the capsule disappears;
the city is then construed as fabric. The concept of the net marks the start of the onward march of
postmodernism, which leaves the utopian individualism of the 1960s on the sidelines.
You’re right to the extent that the critique of capsule architecture means a critique of urban autism. But let me point to a
complementary risk. All the talk of nets and fabrics tends to neutralize existential space, and I think that is as dangerous as
capsule individualism. Net think-ing includes only dots and interfaces that underlie the notion of two or more intersecting lines
or curves, giving you a worldview whose constitutive element is the dot. The net theorists think in radically nonspatial terms,
that is, in two dimensions; they use the concept of anorexia to interpret their relationship to their environment. Their graphics
reveal that the individual world agency is seen as an intersection between lines lacking volume. I, by contrast, go for the
concept of the foam bubble or the world cell in order to show that even the individual element already contains intrinsic
expansion. We should not revert to an ontology of the dot, but take as the minimum variable in our thinking the cell that is
capable of constituting a world. A little more monadology cannot harm us: The monad is not a dot bereft of extension; it has
the character of a microworld. “Cell” expresses the fact that the individual place has the shape of a world. The metaphor of
the fabric or net at best gives you minute knots, but you can’t inhabit a node. By contrast, the foam metaphor emphasizes
the microcosmic, intrinsic spatiality of each individual cell.

However, the metaphor implies a question: Where does it lead to if asked in the context of architecture?
Architects tend to take images literally.
That happened ages ago. Frei Otto is one of the Modern architects who tried to derive nature-like or organomorphic spatial
structures from soap bubbles. The foam metaphor supports an intellectual virtue: It prevents us from reverting to the
oversimplifying Platonic geometries that were transported by the traditional history of architecture. There are no rectangular
shapes in foam, and that is interesting news. And there are no longer any primitive spherical structures, at least if foams pass
beyond their wet or autistic stage. Within them, reciprocal forces of deformation are always at work that ensure that we get
structures that are not smooth and in which more complex geometric rules prevail.

What do you have against right angles?

The idea underlying this theory of diverse spaces can only be grasped if we also consider the reflection on alternative
load-bearing structures underpinning the spherology. We live in an age in which classical load-bearing structures based on
pressure give way to structures based on tensile forces, that is, integral units of tension. I am of course thinking primarily of
Fuller’s well-known tensegrities and of pneumatic edifices and 20th-century air structures. The new logic of structures
functions throughout beyond all walls and pillars. Tensegrities form the technical transition from the metaphor of foam to
modern buildings. Foam is a kind of natural tensegrity, especially when it ceases to take the form of “individualistic” foam, in
which, in a liquid solution, individual bubbles float pass each other hardly touching. If a foam grows old and dry, a complex
internal architecture arises. Many bubbles burst; the residual air from the burst bubble then enters the adjacent bubbles, and
the foam dries up from within. Beautiful, morphologically discerning structures arise, polyhedron foams. They are completely
defined by the motif of co-isolation, which is to say the foam cell shares with its neighbor the fact that it is separate from
it–my walls are your walls. What joins us is that we have turned our backs on each other. The concept of co-isolation is
fundamental for the universe of foamy shapes. The adjacency of world projects or living spaces within a co-isolated structure
has a quality different from the vicinity of spaces within traditional segmented cultures. There, everything social is
partialized—the world is a conglomerate of deserted yards. The image of the sack of potatoes that Marx uses in his 18th
Brumaire to describe the situation of the allotment farmers in France is a prime description of the state of wet foam. Each cell
floats past the other cells, blind to its shared environment, not touching, for all their similarity.

How much of the psychosocial constitution of space remains in the metaphor of foam, and what remains of the
constructivist side to constituting space?
Foam, in my opinion, is a very useful expression for what architects call density—itself a negentropic factor. Density can be
expressed in psychosocial terms by a coefficient of mutual irritation. People generate atmosphere by mutually exerting
pressure on one another, crowding one another. We must never forget that what we term “society” implies the phenomenon of
un-welcome neighbors. Thus, density is also an expression for our excessively communicative state, and incident-ally, the
dominant ideology of communication is repeatedly prompting us to expand it further. Anyone taking density seriously will, by
contrast, end up praising walls. This remark is no longer compatible with classic Modernism, which established the ideal of the
trans-parent dwelling, the ideal that inside relationships should be reflected on the outside and vice versa. Today, we are
again foregrounding the way a building can isolate, although this should not be confused with its massiveness. Seen as an
independent phenomenon, isolation is one form of explication of the conditions of living with neighbors. Someone should write
a book in praise of isolation, describing a dimension of human coexistence that recognizes that people also have an infinite
need for noncommunication. Modernity’s dictatorial traits all stem from an excessively communicative anthropology: For all
too long, the dogmatic notion of an excessively communicative image of man was naively adopted. By means of the image of
foam you can show that the small forms protect us against fusion with the mass and the corresponding hypersociologies. In
this sense, foam theory is a polycosmology.

So each soap bubble is a cosmos unto itself?

No, that would again be an overly autistic construction. In truth, we have to do here with a discrete theory of coexistence. All
being-in-the-world possesses the traits of coexistence. The question of being so hotly debated by philosophers can be asked
here in terms of the co-existence of people and things in connective spaces. That implies a quadruple relationship: Being
means someone (1) being together with someone else (2) and with something else (3) in something (4). This formula
describes the minimum complexity you need to construct in order to arrive at an appropriate concept of world. Architects are
involved in this consideration, since for them being-in-the-world means dwelling in a building. A house is a three-dimensional
answer to the question of how someone can be together with someone and something in something. In their own way,
architects interpret this most enigmatic of all spatial pre-positions, namely the “in.”

Why do you think the preposition “in” is enigmatic?

Because it highlights both being-contained-in and being-outside. People are ecstatic beings. They are, to use Heidegger’s
terms, forever held outside in the open; they can never definitely be included in some container—other than graves, that is.
In the ontological sense, they are “outside” in the world, but they can only be outside to the degree that they are stabilized
from within from something that gives them firm support. This aspect needs to be emphasized today in contrast to the
current romanticism of openness. It is spatial immune systems that enable us to give being-outside a tolerable form.
Buildings are thus systems to compensate for ecstasy. Here, the architect should be located, typologically speaking, in the
same ranks as the priest and the therapist—as an accomplice in repelling intolerable ecstasy. Incidentally, in this context
Heidegger focuses less on architecture and more on language, and it is indeed language in its habitual form that is a perfect
agenda to compensate for an undesired ecstasy. Since most people always say the same things all their lives—and their
language games are, as a rule, completely repetitive—we live in a world of symbolic redundancy that functions just as well as
a house with very thick walls. “Language is the house of being,” postulated Heidegger, and we are gradually under-standing
what he meant when he came up with the phrase. Language is a staunch fortress in which we can ward off the open.
Nonetheless, we occasionally let visitors in. In human relationships, speaking and building usually create sufficient security
that you can now and then permit ecstasy. For this reason, from my viewpoint the architect is someone who philosophizes in
and through material. Someone who builds a dwelling or erects a building for an institution makes a statement on the
relationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic, or, if you will, between the world as apartment and the world as agora.

Notes
1. Sphären (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998–2004).
2. [Vers une Architecture, 1923.]
3. See Alfred A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1991).